In this economic environment it’s understandable that people are concerned about anything that could cause job losses. Globalism, for all its benefits, has been disruptive of many industries workforces and, according to the latest polls , 36% of us are worried about our jobs. The advent of Cloud Computing and it’s data center automation characteristics has, at first glance, the potential to eliminate the jobs of many data center workers. Cloud Computing, the argument goes, will ultimately gut the data center staffs of large and small businesses alike.
There may be some credence to that argument.
Cloud computing has the potential to disrupt an entire class of IT worker, those that physically build and maintain the data center. While Cloud vendors, ourselves included, are touting the cost benefits of the new technology we generally talk about converting Capex to Opex. Additionally, we site time to market or “Business Agility” as another key cost reduction benefit. Most of us, however, don’t see data center work going away. Rather, we see it changing from one of pulling cables and inserting blades to building monitoring and scaling policies or writing VM bundling scripts. Maybe writing a few lines of Ruby to enhance a puppet library. The workers that do the physical labor in the data center will still be needed but most likely will need to migrate to the geographies that host the massive new cloud centers being built in places like Oregon, Washington or the Mid West’s wind farms.
The classic Sys Admin, however, still has a role front and center in the new Cloud based data center. The Cloud Sys Admin never again sets her eyes on a physical server but instead manages a 10,000 node grid from her iPhone while standing in line at the corner cafe. Not necessarily a bad thing…
